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The author of the article refers to a DOUBLING of the risk of suicidality (from 2%
to 4%) as "slight". The author also cites a gradual increase in suicides from
2000-2009, apparently in support of the theory that awareness of the
black box warning has scared people away from antidepressants, resulting
in an increase in suicides.

So a 6.4% increase in the suicide rate over 5 years is noteworthy,
according to the author, but a 100% increase in suicidality on SSRI's versus placebo is
"slight"?

Matters get worse for this sophistry - much worse. From the
period of 1999-2000 until 2009-2010, antidepressant usage increased from
6.5% to 10.4% of the general population. ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24345349
). So during the period when people were supposedly scared away from
SSRI's, their use increased by 60%.

Oh yeah, and by the way, that also
means that during the period when suicides increased by 6.4%,
antidepressant use was on the rise, too. No surprise, seeing as how the
manufacturers' own clinical trial data showed a doubling of the risk of
suicidality on SSRI's versus placebo.

Based on actual scientific data, a better article would not have examined whether to remove the
black box warning of suicidality on SSRI's, but rather whether we should
replace SSRI's as the standard of care for depression with a sugar
pill.

Furthermore, the author does not tell us who the 11
psychiatrists were who recommended removing the black box warning
(whereas she does tell us that 3 of the 4 in favor of the black box
warning were involved in the FDA's original decision to adopt the
warning), so we cannot cross-check for conflicts of interest among those
psychiatrists in favor of removing the black box warning.